This invention relates to a housing for receiving and storing printed circuit boards and for coupling the printed circuit boards to corresponding connectors.
Housings for printed circuit board assemblies including a backplane assembly with connectors for electrically interconnecting the circuit board assemblies are widely used. The printed circuit board assemblies comprise electrical components mounted on printed circuit boards. The housings include a frame guide rail structure for slidably receiving and guiding a printed circuit board assembly along a given path within the housing and for supporting the printed circuit board assembly in a given aligned position. The backplane assembly comprises a printed circuit board and an array of printed circuit board connectors, each connector receiving an edge of the board of the printed circuit board assembly. The connectors have contact pins extending from the connector body. The contact pins are often soldered to the backplane printed circuit board conductors. The printed circuit board assemblies are stacked in the housing one above the other in parallel fashion, or side by side vertically. Examples of frames and housings for holding printed circuit board assemblies are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,368,115; 3,489,954; 3,704,394; 3,838,777; and 4,328,898. The problem generally with these prior art frames and housings is that they tend to require fasteners, e.g., screws, to attach the backplane assembly to the guide rail structure. This tends to be cumbersome to assemble and does not lend itself to modular arrangements in that screw holes of different elements such as a frame and a backplane assembly usually need to be aligned and require additional fabrication and time consuming assembly steps.